First, before I forget: Stockholming, Week 5. See what I mean about the pencil skirt? I knew you would. The blouse is a size too large (and wouldn't have been at Christmas, so yay there), but you can tell I was feeling pretty sassy. And to my brother: while I may have larger-than-average calves, there is absolutely a clear transition/narrowing from calves to ankles. I reject the notion that I possess cankles. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but there you go.
Okay--to Mother's Day. I was listening to NPR, as I am wont to do, on Monday, the day after Mother's Day, and I heard Michel Martin deliver a monologue thanking all the mothers without children (Can I Just Tell You?). Normally I love Martin's monologues, and I often agree with the points that she makes, but this one got me on the negative. I don't mean to be a pill, or a horribly insensitive woman, but Mother's Day is for mothers. Period. Michele writes:
"I'm thinking about your girl pal who shows up with a latte and takes your kids to the park just when you can't take one more sibling squabble or when that big report is due. I am thinking about the women who take nieces and nephews on college tours and on camping trips and, sometimes, go all in and take kids home, for a month or a year or forever, when the men and women who created those children just cannot do what they are supposed to do."
In the last half of the last sentence--those women who mother a child because a parent is gone, the foster mothers and guardians and grandmothers and surrogate mothers, who take on the life of a child for the entirety of both of their lives--I will agree that those women deserve recognition as mothers, because they do what mothers do. They go all in--money, time, heart, all of it. They become, despite biology to the contrary, parents and mothers.
But take note: if you give the child back, you're not its mother. The girl pal helping you out for an hour or two? She's not being a coparent, and she's not doing it for your kids. She's being a friend, because she loves you, and she will return your children when they drive her crazy. The female relatives who do the college visits, or host your kids for the summer, or take them camping because you hate camping, are being aunts and grandmothers and cousins--they're being family, but at the end of the day, they're not paying the emotional, physical, and financial check of parenthood. They're good people, and they deserve recognition, but I'm sorry: they're not mothers. In fact, "the aunt who buys you graduation shoes when your parents can't afford them" or the women who help you when your parents can't or won't--that aunt's undermining the parents if she's not getting the parents in on those gifts. There may be a lesson she's negating in the not-having and the not-paying or the not-helping. If she were a parent, she would hate that behavior.
I may never be a mother, though I pray all the time that's not the case. But it's a potential reality that I accept. I feel for all the women on the discussion board at NPR who feel that they're being left behind on Mother's Day, that they're hurt by the fact that they desired to be mothers and couldn't. But why is it a condemnation of those who can't mother to celebrate those who have? Has Mother's Day really become so important socially that it makes more people feel badly about not being mothers than feel good because they are mothers? Or are we just being too damned sensitive? FYI, I don't get upset on Admin's Day that I don't get flowers--I'm not an admin, despite all the things I do that are administrative. I don't flip out on Teacher Appreciation Day because I don't get flowers for teaching Confirmation. While I played it up for comic effect, because it was expected, I never actually had any desire on Valentine's Day to eat my weight in B&J's or to wear black because I wasn't in a relationship.
When I think about these kinds of things, the idea of participation trophies and everyone-is-special days, I am saddened by just how envious we're becoming, and how unsatisfied we are with all we've been given. Not being a mother doesn't diminish your womanhood, and a society that thinks it does can go eff itself. Not being a mother gives a woman a unique opportunities to do the things that mothers don't have time, money, or energy to do. It gives her time to volunteer. It gives her money to travel. It gives her the opportunity to ignore all kids if she simply doesn't like them. It gives her an opportunity to be either selfish or selfless in a way that mothers just can't be. Celebrating mothers, or architects, or priests, or engineers, or nurses, or teachers, or fathers does not invalidate the contributions of all the people who are not those things. Accept who you are, and and others for who the are, rather than envying them for being what you are not. Their success does not reflect on you, and recognizing them doesn't demean you: if that's what you're feeling, you're doing it to yourself.
Am I completely wrong, O Reader?
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